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July 2005

Anarticle in Forbes is making the rounds. The idea is that there's a third type of production, informations that's created and shared in a commons. I can't really comment on the economic placement that he is describing, though the ideas here are certainly highly relevant for valuing knowledge within the firm or the market.

I
believe that one of the major movements of this century will be to
bring Accounting and Economic practices in line with beliefs about
sustainability. The idea that zero is a number
is meant to represent the idea that by avoiding valuation of
intangibles we implicitly value them at zero, which most people
acknoweldge is not an accurate amount of worth. Similarly, the idea
that infinity is well-defined
is meant to refer to the idea that while we think of "very big" as
infinite, it's actually not. An infinite ocean could actually absorb
our effluent; a finite one actually can't.

"Full Spectrum Accounting"
was chosen to allude to the revelation that was the concept of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the idea that we only account for the concretely measurable, just as we only could detect certain wavelengths as visible, but were blind to all else.

Please email me or post your comments or referrals of people whose work I might be interested in. If you, yourself, do research or work in the valuation of intangibles, are a financial analyst, controller, are affiliated with the SEC or FASB, or do work on economic indicators that incorporate sustainability, I'm particularly eager to know who you are and hear your thoughts.